It feels like Kurt Vonnegut is reaching across the table, forcing his novel upon me. I can hear him shouting, “Do you see? Do you see what I’ve done here!”
And I say, “Yes, you’ve repeated yourself.”
“No, you nitwit,” he says, rightfully condescending, “I’ve tricked you. Look again.”
His father died in a hunting accident during the war. So it goes. Continued…
As I read the next-to-last chapter of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, a thought occurred to me:
Tell them nothing and they will know everything.
The beauty of writing lies equally in what isn’t written at all. The reader is given the unspoken responsibility of taking what is given and imagining the rest. In the chapter I read last night, three characters are walking to battle, and several unrelated paragraphs later, they are bleeding and worn and tired, and the battle is over.
In the hands of a brilliant reader, the best part of a story was never even in the book.
I am not the sum of my characters. I must learn to separate what I think from what they think, my wants from theirs. I took an objective look at something I wrote a year ago. Back then, I thought it was almost flawless except for one tiny detail that I couldn’t figure out. Now I have. I believed the first person narrative was exactly as the character would tell the story, but it wasn’t. The character has suffered more than I thought and he knew that his suffering was not over. The story cannot be about redemption because the character is of no such deserve; the story is of fault and consequence. And it goes much deeper than the weight of my pen.
I’ve worlds at my fingertips because I have the imagination to give them life. I can create characters in those worlds with nothing more than a thought. I give them dilemma and I give them choice and yet I do not control their response. At that point all I can do is observe, and if I haven’t made them real enough to direct themselves, then that is my dilemma; and my only choice, as the author, is what parts of the story to tell. I can leave out anything I want for whatever reason I want, and this is an author’s only ability. If I do my duty well then my characters are real, and there is a mutual respect between us; and if I miss something important in their story, I should feel endless remorse.
There are some things that I just don’t do when I write. Things that I consider to be literary faults. One of them is references.
I avoid pop culture references as much as possible. When I read a story that refers to, say, a Beatle, the thing that immediately jumps out at me is how distracted the reader is going to be if they don’t know what the person looks like. Continued…
They say that when you first start writing that you’re not writing for yourself. You’re writing for the reader, and you have to keep catering to the reader until you have enough notoriety to write for yourself. That hardly seems fair, writing for years and years in a certain specific style, confined to rules and restrictions, perfecting a craft that isn’t yours. It’s like teaching artists to trace, singers to lip sync. Apparently, though, this is how it’s done, as I’m often reminded. A formality, like tipping after a meal, or showering regularly.
Readers must be an awfully meek beast. They prefer things to be familiar and any kind of unexpected change loses their interest. Anything that makes them think makes them uncomfortable. I apologize if I’ve made any of you.
Think.
